A photo essay at the BBC about Polish night bakers reminds me again how much I like chleb - rye bread - and other Polish food. And reminds me to write about it again. When folks came over the other day to test drive a couple of weisse beers that will show up at the LCBO next spring, there was Krakovska or Lwowska or some other urban-named kiełbasa from the place that has the good stuff. Unlike lamer more westerly sausage bound in some odd pasticity of plasticity, you get real gut as bung and an inside that is neither dried out or ground fine. Chunks of pig flesh, all garlicked and peppered. There is now a bar in Vancouver that only sells cold cuts and cheese, thus avoiding the need of a full kitchen. In my tavern in Valhalla, all the cold cuts are Polish even if the salamagundy, mustard pickles and million-dollar relish are Nova Scotian. The best I ever had was the grannie made smoked hams bought at the Kołobrjeg farmers' market on the day the Inuit Siberians were there with white fox pelts for a couple for bucks each. Grannie sold the one pound hams, maybe two or three her week's production, on a small tea towel before her next to the pickled mushrooms, priced with as many twenties and thousands as possible: "dwadziescia dwa tysaic dwa sto, Pani?" They were just on the line between raw and not raw, passed beneath the shadow of no official's stoop, were sliced thin and eaten with beer back in the kitchen near the fire. Good piggie.